Tag: school

Review: Getting gifted homeschoolers (almost) right

Posted on by Suki

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl
by Stacy McAnulty
Random House, 2018

As a teacher of gifted learners, I am always interested in how they are portrayed in kids’ books. Generations of smart kids had to see themselves portrayed as clueless, clumsy, antisocial idiot savants. The Great Brain aside, it was definitely not cool to be smart.

And then there’s what mainstream writers do to homeschoolers. They’re weirdo Christian separatists who have never learned how to behave in polite society. At least sometimes they get to be vampires, too.

Stereotypes don’t come from nowhere—there’s almost always a kernel of truth. But it’s a writer’s job to go beyond the stereotype and find the real person.

Stacy McAnulty does just that in The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl.

This middle grade novel presents us with a familiar gifted homeschooler: Lucy is very weird. Struck by lightning when she was younger, she’s now a middle schooler who’s never been to school, whose OCD makes her stick out in any crowd, and who is immediately the target of Maddie, the alpha dog bully of her grade. Lucy is in school because her grandmother, who’s her guardian, believes she needs to be socialized. Yet another homeschooler/gifted kid stereotype.

But that’s where the stereotypes end, and the real child emerges.

First of all, Lucy does not buy her grandmother’s arguments for a minute. She knows that she’s not the problem—other kids and adults are the problem. Her grandmother (a wonderful character despite her stereotypical belief in the fallacy of socialization) has raised her well. She’s a self-possessed, thoughtful kid who makes the thoroughly believable choice not to let anyone know just how smart she is.

As she tells the girl who becomes her best friend, Windy, her OCD already makes it clear she’s weird. She doesn’t need any other baggage.

Charmingly, Lucy thinks her way through the problem and calculates how to get through this mandatory year of socialization. Just the fact that she’s able to do this disproves her grandmother’s opinion that she needs to be socialized—she gets what the other kids and the teachers need, and she sets about giving it to them.

She purposely becomes an A student, good enough to get into the college she wants to attend—but not a perfect A student. She calculates how to do just well enough not to gain too much attention.

She knows she’s not going to be acceptable to most of the other kids, so she doesn’t try. She presses on fulfilling her own needs for order (she has to sit and stand three times before sitting down in class) and cleanliness (the kids call her “the cleaning lady” because she wipes down every surface she comes into contact with using disposable wipes she carries in her backpack). But she’s thoughtful and kind to the other students, and soon at least two of them notice and accept her.

The miscalculation in the title does not refer to her attempt to deceive the others—she fits in well enough that the kids and teachers don’t guess just how smart she is until various circumstances lead to her unmasking. Her miscalculation is that she’ll be able to ride out this year without forming real friendships, experiencing real growth, and actually learning something (though not necessarily what her teachers think she’s learning).

I loved how realistic Lucy is, how all the characters (even the bully) are well-drawn and sympathetic, and how the book gets past almost all of the usual stereotypes and gifted homeschooler tropes.

I finished with only one question: Why does it take a strike of lightning to make Lucy smart? Why can’t she just be a generic smart kid, born that way? I know that the lightning offered a fun opportunity for characterization. But it’s a bit like writing a story about a white kid who wakes up Black and has to face racism. Why not just write about a Black kid?

Gifted kids are real. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them do have disabilities (called twice-exceptionalities in the gifted world). Some of them are socially awkward.

But they’re all people, and they deserve to be integrated into our schools—and our literature—as fully human and deserving of the same care and respect as everyone else. The fact that the author chose to make Lucy homeschooled gets at an ugly truth: Our society can be very, very nasty to kids who don’t fit in. Teachers largely don’t like being corrected. (Lucy actually keeps her mouth shut when her math teacher makes a mistake on a problem, for good reason.) Kids don’t like being bested, especially when it’s so easy for the gifted kid to do it. (Lucy is careful not to be the best at anything.)

But gifted kids are not an accident, not a strike of lightning. They’re just one side of the wonderful rainbow of human variability. Let’s just accept them and move on.

So yes, this is a great book for your gifted kid, but when they ask why they are the way they are, make sure they know that they are no accident. They are exactly the way they’re supposed to be.

Related:

The Search For The Girl Scientist In Literature

Books Featuring Homeschoolers

“What do you have against the public school system?”

Posted on by Suki

It’s the sort of question homeschoolers report receiving in stores, at the Thanksgiving dinner table, while pumping gas… In this case, it was in the hot tub at my health club.

He prefaced the question by explaining that public education “was sort of a family business,” with relatives working as teachers and administrators. When he found out that I teach homeschoolers, and homeschooled my own children, that question was his response.

What do I have against the public school system?

I can’t answer for all homeschoolers, but I can certainly answer for myself:

I have nothing against the public school system

My husband and I were both educated in fine public schools. We had planned to send our children to our neighborhood public schools, and tried very hard to do so. But a variety of issues got in our way.

Like America’s founders, I believe that a healthy, robust public school system is essential to our democracy. That said, public schools can’t do it all.

All public schools are not equal

Our first foray away from public school, I have to admit, had something to do with convenience and a lot to do with environment. Our local school’s kindergarten program, at the time we looked at it, was overcrowded and uninspired.

It also started at 7:42 in the morning, and I had a baby. Frankly, I didn’t want to have to get a sleepy child to school at 7:30.

I won’t apologize for what we did: We bought our older child a really cool year of climbing trees and playing in the mud at an experiential learning school on an old farm. It didn’t end up being the school for us long term, but at the time, its relaxed schedule and lack of kindergarten academics suited us just fine.

Later in our children’s school years we avoided our local public schools for other reasons. Our high school didn’t offer the college-level math, science, and computer science that one of my kids wanted. It didn’t offer a band program for my other student. Because we have the resources (and I understand that not everyone does) we chose homeschool for one of the kids and a different public high school for the other.

Not every public school is equipped to handle every child

When my younger child was in preschool, it became clear that we were facing some difficult developmental issues. No diagnosis seemed to fit. School environments exacerbated the problems. Everyone we consulted with had the same advice: avoid public school special education for this child.

First we tried a little private kindergarten in a cabin in the redwoods. That failed. Then we tried homeschool. That succeeded. Our public schools just weren’t set up for our child’s needs at that time.

Not every child is right for public school

When my older child joined us in homeschooling, it was because he was very advanced and self-motivated in some areas and completely uninterested in others. In school, he would have been a mediocre student. In homeschool, he was a star. Eventually, he caught up in his lagging areas and he’s now a successful college student.

In school, he’d been frustrated that he didn’t have time to follow his passions. Once he had that time, he was more willing to address other areas of learning in a more gentle fashion.

Not every family needs to follow the same path

Traditional public education emphasizes following standards. In all seriousness, an adult once asked me how my children were going to be able to be educated if they didn’t follow California public schools’ standard of studying the mission system in fourth grade.

Maybe you think the answer is obvious, but for that parent it wasn’t. The possibility that a family could study missions at a different age, or not study missions at all, didn’t occur to her. Lest that seem a bit ridiculous, it’s important to remember that standards weren’t based on how children actually learn. They were based on how children were traditionally taught. My children are now extremely well-educated, though neither of them studied missions in fourth grade or memorized their times tables in third.

(I will add that neither my husband nor I, both raised in other states, knew much about California missions until we moved here!)

And by the way, homeschoolers can attend public school

We did, in fact, use the public school system throughout our homeschooling years. In our county, we are fortunate to have a healthy slate of alternative public school options!

Freedom of choice is as American as the Constitution

Freedom of choice is firmly embedded in the founding of this country. Our founding documents inspired governments and revolutions around the world for a simple reason: Freedom of choice—control over your religion, your body, who you associate with, what you do for a living—is fundamentally important.

Of course we all support reasonable limits on choices. We don’t allow parents to abuse children, but we do allow reasonable discipline. We don’t allow murder, but we do allow doctors not to continue life-prolonging treatments. We shouldn’t allow educational neglect, but we do allow a certain amount of freedom of choice in how our children are educated.

Education is a balancing act

We start with a baby, and if we’re lucky, we send a fully functioning adult out into the world. But there are many ways to get from the beginning to the desired end result.

Homeschooling is just one way to balance our children’s needs with the opportunities available to us. Homeschooling is not for everyone, and it won’t solve all the world’s problems.

But the freedom to choose homeschooling improves children’s lives, and I believe it can strengthen our public schools as well.

More about homeschooling

4 reasons why schools shouldn’t play “immigration police”

Posted on by Suki

Amongst the various proposals put forth to deal with illegal immigration there is a perennial one: catch ’em at school. People generally want their children to get educated, and also, free public schools are free childcare, right?

School children in New Mexico in 1941. (Wikimedia Commons)

So the thought goes like this: Figure out which “illegal kids” are at schools, and then go after their parents.

Britain is already doing it. And with conservatives in control of the U.S. federal government, we might be following close on their heels.

Here’s why forcing schools to track undocumented kids is a bad idea:

An educated population is always better

This is a rule that never changes, no matter which kids you’re talking about: If you want your country to function better, you want educated people.

Educated people are healthier, they have fewer children, they provide more skilled labor, they pay more taxes.

If you force undocumented adults to keep their kids at home, the only net change is that our country has fewer educated people, which means they’ll have more kids, be unskilled workers, and pay less in taxes.

This is not what we want.

Healthier kids make a healthier society

Children eating school lunch in Virginia. (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)

Our public schools don’t just educate. They offer free health testing such as vision and hearing. They screen kids for severe dental problems. Teachers are trained to watch for signs of physical abuse.

The reason we put this money into our public schools is that it is paid back many times over. Healthier kids are cheaper to have in our society than sick kids. Sick kids turn into sick adults, who need more care, and more expensive care.

This is not what we want.

The job of educators is to educate

When we attempt to turn teachers into anything but educators, we end up with conflicts that muddy their job descriptions and decrease their effectiveness. This is something that you’ll hear conservatives say often: Teachers should just be teaching the “three R’s.”

In that case, it looks like we agree on this: If we turn teachers into immigration police, they will have less time to teach, and less focus when they are teaching.

This is not what we want.

“Street Urchin” by John George Brown, 1885 (Wikimedia Commons)

Going after children is not only unethical, it’s un-Christian

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. [Deuteronomy 24:16]

We have a long tradition in Western culture of not blaming children for what their parents do. If we decide to change this tradition, should we imprison children whose parents are convicted of felonies? Should we refuse to feed children whose parents are unwilling to work? Do we leave children with abusive parents simply because the child was born to those parents?

Children of those who have immigrated to the U.S. without legal papers have done nothing wrong. They shouldn’t have to fear going to school. We may as a society decide that undocumented adult workers should fear our government. But allowing immigration officials to catch families through their children imposes immoral burdens upon the children.

This is not what we want.

In other words, quite simply, Britain is doing the wrong thing. Our government has historically done the right thing. Let’s keep it that way.

The way we do it

Posted on by Suki

Until recently, pretty much every mention I found of homeschooling in the mainstream press looked nothing like what we do at our house. Or nothing like people I know do at their houses. And definitely not like what the homeschoolers I know do when they’re out of the house, which is in general a significant piece of their time. According to the popular press, we were separatist religious fanatics or hippies raising our children like wolves.

Recently, however, I’ve seen a few pinpoints of light out there in the dismal mainstream world. Two of them come from Quinn Cummings, who is apparently famous as a child actor (since I ignore popular culture her name was meaningless to me!). Her message, however, was the one I’d been hoping to see in the popular press: Homeschoolers are choosing a valid form of education that is different from school, but most of us are neither separatist religious fanatics nor hippies raising our children like wolves.

Cummings has put out a book, which I haven’t read, and in the process of publicizing it she has made us rather invisible homeschoolers more visible. In the Wall Street Journal, she not only presents her own reason for homeschooling but also gives people a sense of what is a much more important thing in homeschooling: the hybrid ways of learning that most of our kids are involved in. On the Diane Rehm Show, she necessarily had to stay more personal, but she pushed back nice and hard against the really yawn-inducing questions (as far as homeschoolers are concerned) of socialization and how well former homeschoolers integrate with other kids.

Today EdWeek, an education industry publication, published “Hybrid Homeschools Gaining Traction,” a story about homeschooling that is much more familiar to me and the other homeschoolers I know. Though Cummings mentioned “outschooling” as an option in homeschooling, she still answered questions like “how can you teach your daughter math when you are math-phobic?” with traditional homeschooling solutions—in that case, her husband does the teaching.

Of course, sharing the responsibilities of homeschooling happens all the time in homeschools, and it’s a great part of why one of our local homeschooling programs is called Alternative Family Education. Homeschoolers are all about making learning a family affair.

But the reality for most of the families I know is that what we call “home”schooling would be better called—as people I know do—”custom schooling” or “a la carte schooling” or “cooperative learning.” The EdWeek article hits this nail right on the head, and also the article’s very existence is noteworthy: The only “related story” they could find on EdWeek was published in 2008! If that’s not proof that the education establishment has been ignoring a tidal wave, I don’t know what is.

This is not the sort of tidal wave that is going to gather everything into it and destroy everything else in its path. This is the sort of slow-moving wave that is already changing education, though most of the people in the educational establishment are “blissfully” ignorant.

I use the quotes because they only think they’re blissful. They have been ignoring us and it’s been serving them just fine, or so they think. We are educated parents, people who often went to public schools ourselves. We are people who support the concept of education for everyone. But we are people who know that it’s being done all wrong. And we have found that we can’t vote at the ballot box—Republicans and Democrats are largely unified in their ignorance over what public education should be.

So we’ve taken the vote to the streets. We are leaving schools—both public and private—and looking for something else. We’re looking for an educational world in which, when a teacher doesn’t mesh with a particular learner, you simply find a different teacher. We are looking for an educational world in which a kid who studies algebra at the age of 9 is just as comfortable as a kid who’s not ready for algebra till 16. We’re looking for an educational world in which knitting, map-making, and storytelling are as respectable to study as math and science.

And—EdWeek readers will be surprised to hear this—we have found that world. It’s homeschooling, and whatever we don’t find out there for our kids we are busy creating. It’s a tidal wave because there is no way that our experiences are not going to create fundamental change in education. The blissful establishment has been put on notice by one of their own publications that people are starting to notice what we’re doing.

Outschooling, custom schooling, a la carte schooling, unschooling, cooperative learning, family education, life learning… Whatever you call it, that’s what we’re doing.

Our kids are learning, they’re doing great on standardized tests (though we don’t really care about that), and best of all, they’re doing great at life, which is what we care about most of all.

Now available